Fashions come and go in academia and politics as in the rest of the
world. However an enduring theme in observations of political leadership
is a focus on the individual at the expense of placing that person in
the context of circumstances, relationships and judgments in which they
lived and acted. That is, the focus is often on what social scientists
call ‘agency’ rather than on the dynamic relationship of
individual agency and broader social forces. This focus is particularly
evident when observers claim that a political leader succeeded or failed
because he (less often she) was charismatic, strong, principled, arrogant,
ideological, popular, in touch with the people, or an out and out bastard.
Such judgments usually ignore the more interesting dilemma of how leaders
must be all of those things at different times.

Instead, a rise or a fall becomes easy to explain with one of these
traits. Keating and Howard lost power because of arrogance, which accusation
implies a loss of touch with Australians. But this explanation ignores
the fact that the Liberal Party tried, and failed, to hammer Keating
with the arrogance tag in 1993 during recession, and tried, and succeeded,
in 1996 when economic times were better. Arrogance was not a terminal
condition for Menzies, Whitlam and Fraser: it actually got them elected.
In fact, it must have taken more than a touch of arrogance for them or
for Keating, Howard and others to think that they could comfortably occupy
the top political job. Wall flowers don’t become prime ministers.

A simple focus on agency reinforces ideas of politics as a two horse
race, either between opposing leaders of parties or between contestants
within a party. That way, the narrative endures while an endless queue
of characters waits to step up to their assigned roles. The narrative
is reinforced with labels like ‘the Menzies Era’, ‘the
Hawke Years’, and ‘the Howard Years’. Against this
background, it is interesting to see whether the two books under review
fall into the familiar pattern.

Wall flowers don’t become
prime ministers.

The van Onselen and Senior book follows a long and honourable tradition
of post-election journalistic accounts, such as Pamela Williams The
Victory (1997), Laurie Oakes The Making of an Australian Prime
Minister (1973), and Alan Reid’s The Gorton Experiment (1971)
or The Whitlam Venture (1976), in which the authors were inside
witnesses to the events or, in this case, interviewed participants in
the events. Therefore, van Onselen and Senior present a good useful blow-by-blow
struggle between Howard and Rudd and their teams for the year leading
up to the 2007 election. So, for example, we find out the use of the
media by politicians’ offices to signal moves, with leaks of leadership
disputes from Downer’s office to Sky news during APEC in response
to Howard’s appearance on the 7.30 Report which was designed
to squash Liberal dissent (p. 97).

It is a good story within the terms of the narrative. Van Onselen and
Senior start with 1 December 2006, when Rudd announced his challenge
to Beazley. This date effectively sets the parameters for explaining
Howard’s defeat. In a contest of certain qualities and tactics
between Rudd and Howard, the latter came out the loser. What may have
happened before that date to build the momentum towards defeat is mostly
beyond the book’s horizon. For example, Rudd’s listening
tour (p. 9) was a replay of Latham’s 2004 bus tour of New South
Wales to numerous meetings with groups of locals; Rudd also ended his
tour with a Whitlamesque announcement of a major cities program (p. 13).
These parallels go unremarked.

More importantly, the restricted chronology of the book sits rather
oddly with the introduction, which presents a range of plausible reasons
for Howard’s defeat—the public shift on climate change and
David Hicks (see below), the pincer of interest rate promises and rises
crushing Howard, the tiredness of the government, the Iraq war, arrogance,
the extremism of Workchoices, and the failure of Howard’s ‘antennae’ (p.
vii)—but leaves them there because there is no means of tying them
to the rest of the book.

Van Onselen and Senior attribute the shift in public opinion on climate
change to the influence of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (p.
vii). This seems to be a propaganda explanation, assuming that Australians
were taken in by the film rather than changing their minds deliberately,
on basis of events and reasons. Also, the claim doesn’t match a
later statement that there was mounting evidence of climate change (p.
25). Arrogance is not enough of an explanation nor is tiredness when
one remembers the second Menzies government lasted five years longer
than Howard’s.

The most important weapon of a politician is character credibility with
audiences. Once it is fatally damaged, most people will not listen no
matter how good the message (Rolfe 2008). This explains Howard’s
frequent exasperation as he attempted to get his message across during
2007 (for example, pp. 39, 54–5, 67). It explains why accusations
of ‘arrogance’, ‘clever politician’, and ‘tiredness’ got
traction at this time and not other times. But this damage to credibility
happened before 2007. It not only built on historic public knowledge
about Howard as a ‘mean and tricky’ man but also ensued from
a crucial shift in public opinion around 2005.

The most important weapon of
a politician is character credibility with audiences.

In the wake of the July 2005 bombings in London, Howard continued what
had been his successful stance as ‘wartime prime minister’ guarding
national security. However, other events undermined this rhetoric and
put his climate change scepticism in an unfavourable light. That is,
public opinion became less concerned about terrorism and found plausible
reasons to believe there was something in this climate change business,
because of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, a national drought that
inaugurated water restrictions, and a 2006 cyclone in Queensland that
sent bananas to $15 per kilo. Moreover, many big businesses were seen
to be taking account of the environment, hence ANZ’s withdrawal,
in 2007, from funding the Gunn paper mill.

Further undermining Howard’s national security discourse was the
worsening civil war in Iraq. Against this background, there was a successful
PR campaign by the legal team of David Hicks. This Australian was captured
in Afghanistan while serving the Taliban, handed to American forces in
2001, and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he lingered with little public
sympathy. Many Iraqi deaths and the iniquity and US Supreme Court rejection
of the military tribunals were changes in social forces that allowed
a PR opportunity for Hicks’ team.

Also in 2005, and providing further evidence of changing social forces,
was the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, which found that most
people didn’t like what they heard about Workchoices and
disliked it more as they learned about it (van Wanrooy 2007, p. 182–92).
In addition, interest rate rises diminished Howard’s reputation
as the battlers’ friend and nullified his 2004 scare that rates
would be higher under Labor. Thus, his 2004 election tactics did not
work in 2007 (p. 116).

It is easy to conclude from van Onselen and Senior that Rudd won because
of media style over substance, particularly with his tactic of ‘me-tooism’ (see
p. 7). This issue is left in the air in the epilogue when they give Julie
Bishop pride of place but no comment on her ‘we wuz robbed by propaganda’ argument:

We won the policy debates at the last election. What we didn’t
win was the media manipulation and the spin. And perhaps we tended
to believe that good policy would sell itself, but we find that Labor
outspun us in the way it put forward its policies (p. 191).

Bishop makes no allowance for persuasion or for the evidence voters
picked up about Workchoices in 2005. It’s the same excuse
the Liberals delivered after the 1993 election. There are two conclusions
to be drawn from Bishop’s stubbornness: first, all those who voted
Labor are manipulated suckers and, second, the Liberals will stay in
opposition if they all believe this. The Liberals spent all last year
dismissing Rudd as a man of stunts and that has been their line about
him this year, as if Howard’s ‘debt truck’ of 1996
wasn’t itself a PR stunt of the sort that all parties indulge now
and then to make their point.

The Costello memoirs can be
best described as ‘Clayton’s rancour’..

Now let us turn to the way Costello constructed his narrative, which
is less concerned with the academic fairness van Onselen and Senior aim
for, and more concerned with self.

Costello starts with the night before the 2007 election at a dinner
with his family and his staffers. It allows him to display—but
not mention—his qualities of love, friendship and loyalty and,
as importantly, the big ‘what if’: what if he had become
prime minister and replaced John Howard? And, what went wrong? As you
would expect, the two questions are linked. These personal qualities
allow Costello to set the tone of the book by taking a swipe at Jackie
Kelly and the furore around bogus Labor leaflets stirring anti-Moslem
sentiment. She came into parliament in 1996 with ‘no background
in the Liberal Party’ and ‘Her loyalty was to Howard’ (p.
2).

Costello often uses the words ‘loyalty’ and ‘patient’ in
conjunction with the Liberal Party and leadership (for example p. 43).
He describes himself ‘patient’ (pp. 240, 244) with Howard
rather than ‘agitating for the leadership’ (p. 240) and ‘undermining’ him
through the years (p. 230). Patience indeed became a virtue in the light
of Howard’s undertaking in 1994 to Costello, and before Ian McLachlan,
to stand down after one term as prime minister. The incident arose publicly
in 2006 when McLachlan revealed his note of the meeting, but in 2003
McLachlan had broached with Costello his frustration at Howard’s
failure to uphold the agreement. Costello already knew of the note but,
significantly, told McLachlan ‘You do what you think is right’ (p.
240). This statement has all the political clarity and cunning of Pontius
Pilate washing his hands of responsibility and provides a window on the
nature of friendship in a party. Costello gave no concrete advice on
what to do, so he could disclaim responsibility but still benefit if
McLachlan exposed the agreement. He could have given clear instructions
rather than leaving the responsibility with McLachlan.

The quality of loyalty in Costello stands in the book in stark contrast
to the acts of disloyalty by Howard, although this is a conclusion left
to the reader. For example, there was the famous Shane Stone memo of
2001 which described Howard as ‘mean and tricky’ but also,
says Costello, included ‘special venom directed at me’ (p.
156). He was ‘surprised that Howard had not told me about it or
at least told me of the areas that criticised me’. When he confronted
Stone about the public leaking of the memo, Stone’s reply ‘was
effectively saying that the leak came from the Prime Minister’s
office’ (p. 157). In this remembrance and in his choice of cartoons,
Costello leads the reader to the prime minister’s door and then
leaves them there. In a Moir cartoon Costello is underwater holding Howard
above the waves in the 2004 election and in a Cook cartoon there is a
senior’s moment of 2016 with the aged pair and Howard announcing ‘I
will contest the next election’.

In other words, the Costello memoirs can be best described as ‘Clayton’s
rancour’, the rancour that you have when you’re not having
rancour. Writing a political memoir after great success but bitter disappointment
must be very hard for a politician who must then tread a careful line
between a desire to tell all and a public perception of overweening resentment.
One need only remember the public reception of Hawke’s autobiography.
Costello had a more recent reminder of how not to go over the top when
Latham won the gold medal for Dummy Spits. The choice of starting point,
of incidents and of what is left out can say it all without ‘doing
a Latham’.

There are few certainties in
politics because the world is imperfect and full of contingencies.

Public ridicule awaits inappropriate authorial decorum: politicians
must match their words and tone very carefully to their audience. A thumbs-down
can be devastating to ambitious politicians for several reasons. They
thrive by projecting credibility and certainty of mind when dealing with
the great problems of the day, hence the need for the touch of arrogance
I noted earlier. Certainty is part of their credibility with the public
and their colleagues. One can see why Kim Beazley and Brendan Nelson
became political fatalities.

Winston Churchill was always certain throughout his long political career.
In 1908 he was president of the Board of Trade and was so certain that
the huge expense of a battleship-building programme would break the British
budget that he attacked the proposal put forward by the First Lord of
the Admiralty. In 1911 he was First Lord and was certain that his bigger
proposal for a battleship-building programme was needed. By 1923, he
was Chancellor of the Exchequer and was so certain of the need for less
naval spending that he almost broke the government (Jenkins 2001, pp.
154, 211). Admittedly circumstances change and therefore one changes
one’s mind but Churchill was a fierce advocate for whatever political
enthusiasm he had at the time. So was Paul Keating who fought tooth-and-nail
for a GST in 1985 and fought just as passionately against a GST in 1993.

Costello is still the advocate barrister and his story is of a long
series of victories that have left Australia better off, including balanced
budgets, independent Reserve Bank, and a well-regulated financial system.
This is fair enough except that he is as afflicted by the usual partisan
amnesia that refuses to concede the continuities between governments
and that economic success did not suddenly start on the day of winning
government. As much as Costello lampoons Wayne Swan for not admitting
good financial regulation was his doing, he does not credit that Labor
may have contributed to his ‘Age of Prosperity’. The narrative
does recognise mistakes have been made—mostly made by other people.
So Costello has fewer regrets than Sinatra in My Way, and remember
that even then Cranky Franky sang ‘I’ve had a few, but then
again, too few to mention’. He mourns the opportunities lost with
Aboriginal reconciliation, the republic and mandatory detention of refugees.

However much certainty is admired in politicians, there are few certainties
in politics because the world is imperfect and full of contingencies.
Therefore, it is often only possible to know that a right decision had
been made until after all the events and consequences had played out
(White 1978, p. 275). Then the story can be constructed with hindsight
and so spin a narrative thread that excludes the uncertainties, complexities,
urgencies and deficiencies of information when decisions are made. This
is how Costello has constructed his memoir.

The plague of contingency upon politics means that politicians must
continually evaluate means and ends. This is often condemned as opportunism
in a leader, as Guy Rundle did of Howard (2006). However political flexibility
has been rightly understood as a valuable political asset by many authors
from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Robert Tucker because of the need to
bypass obstacles and to understand the novelty of different situations,
while still grasping general principles of conduct (Tucker 1977; Mulgan
1977, p. 9–10). It means never completely closing off options,
or never say ‘never’, as Howard found out after 1995. Howard
frequently exhibited flexibility so that he could plausibly say ‘You
know what I stand for even if you don’t like me’ and yet
back flip at moments of his choosing, such as fuel excise in 2001. He
grabbed the opportunity presented by the Little Children Are Sacred report
in 2007 (Anderson & Wild 2007) to intervene in the Northern Territory
but failed to redefine himself on climate change by creating a Shergold
Report (Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading 2007) sooner
than he did.

It can’t be a simple oversight
that led Costello to ignore Workchoices..

This issue of flexibility means I don’t think Costello completely
closed off the option of Liberal leadership when writing this memoir.
It can’t be a mere coincidence that his father-in-law (and co-author)
and brother both came out on the same day to say young Pete still had
the ambition to be prime minister (‘Costello could still lead:
father-in-law’ 2008; Lewis 2008). According to reports in August,
Costello backers were gauging support for him to replace Nelson. Some
Liberals were open to the possibility as long as he did not ‘dump’ on
Howard in his book (Karvelas & Franklin 2008). Here was another reason
to maintain authorial decorum and craft a ‘Clayton’s dump’ rather
than spit the dummy.

It can’t be a simple oversight that led Costello to ignore Workchoices apart
from a favourable comparison over its Jobsback predecessor of
1993 (p. 57). Its unfairness and unpopularity are not raised. Similarly,
he ignores the unfairness of American judicial process that led many
people to change their minds about David Hicks. Along the way Costello
raises what I describe as a legitimate Machiavellian point, when he states
that the border security policy saved lives by dissuading people boarding
unseaworthy boats. (By Machiavellian I do not mean the popular pejorative
implication of deceit and evil but rather that public political morality
is different to private morality and may prove counter-intuitive to what
is generally thought the path to a good outcome.) Yet he undermines this
by ignoring the play on prejudice in 2001 and the hypocrisy and deceit
about what passed between ministers, ministerial advisers and bureaucrats
that seriously damaged public accountability during the Tampa affair
(Weller 2002, pp. 72–4, chapter 4). It is hard to believe Costello
really went through the 32,000 documents in his files (p. xi) to come
up with this book.

Hence, the perpendicular pronoun—I—features so much that
you would not know from this book there was a deputy prime minister involved
in major decisions. Rather than it being a Coalition cabinet with Howard
as leader, Costello always seems to be at the centre of government action
with Howard and always seems to have the correct position that either
confirms or refutes Howard’s decisions. This style reinforces the ‘two
horse race’ view of politics as a simple matter of agency. It not
only fits neatly with a general trend of political analysis, but also
with the philosophy of liberalism, which focuses on the individual and
their qualities to the exclusion of other factors. Hence there is the
elevation of Menzies and Howard to mythic status within the party but
also the extraordinary powers given to the leader to hire and fire and
to set party ideology—if they are a winner. If they lose, they
are out. Therefore, Costello’s call for a cultural change in the
Liberal Party from a cult of personality to a means of leadership transition
is understandable but difficult given the nature of the party.

The paradox in Costello’s call is particularly evident in the
way the book comes back to Prince Peter saying all problems would have
been solved if he inherited the crown from King John. This is the agency
focus. However, this ignores how the times suited Howard and may have
passed with the financial collapse. In all his fiscal rectitude and complaint
of Howard’s fiscal laxity (p. 96), Costello is either deliberately
obtuse about the basis of the ‘Age of Prosperity’ (p. 9)
or didn’t understand the political and economic strategy of Howard
who gave new meaning to that old observation of Sir Keith Hancock: ‘Australian
democracy has come to look upon the state as a vast public utility, whose
duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ (1961,
p. 56).

Howard put the state to the service of individual interests. In the
process, he did not so much reduce the state as shift its political priorities
and stitch together a coalition of constituencies that sheltered within
his language. Menzies did the same (Rolfe 1997, 1999) except Howard overlaid
Menzies’ ‘home-owning democracy’ with his ‘credit
democracy’ and ‘share-owning democracy’. Certainly,
this was an achievement of Howard but he was working with the social
forces of the time—the Australian finance sector and other services
keen for privatisation, the global growth in producer services that also
provide jobs, the economic changes wrought by Labor, and the long tradition
of government policies for families and homes. For all the encomiums
lavished by conservative commentators on Howard’s deep and permanent
connection with families, it was but a passing moment in the grand sweep
of change that must always eventually pull them apart.

The Howard strategy had come
to the end of its political and economic run.

‘The Howard Battlers’ was an amorphous and rhetorically
attractive term that was not simply composed of traditional Labor voters
of the outer suburbs who deserted Labor in 1996, but also included working
and middle class swingers finding it difficult to make ends meet (Green
1997, Brent 2004). He shifted tax rebates and subsidies to suburban families
with family benefits, the baby bonus (of which Costello is proud), rebates
on private health insurance premiums, and support for private schools
in a similar fashion to Menzies (Murphy 1995).

These families lived in homes that benefited from past housing policies
and from asset inflation, which generated a ‘wealth effect’ that
led to increased consumption, which in turn led to increased economic
growth, and so it went on as long as the house prices kept rising to
pay for the credit and consumption. Meanwhile, an insouciant Costello
replied to complaints about the burden of high prices on new entrants
that nobody complains about rising house prices. The First Home Owners
Scheme did not much restrain house prices in its first three years, but
instead injected $4.3 billion into the industry. Negative gearing also
spurred investors and dwelling construction with, for example, $4 billion
of tax benefits in 2002–3 (Berry & Dalton 2004, pp. 79–81).

‘Mums and Dads’ were also encouraged by the Howard Government
to own shares. There was $95 billion worth of privatisation during the
1990s by Federal and state governments (Walker & Walker 2000, p.
23) and more was opened up after the Ralph Review, with its recommendation
of capping capital gains on shares, and tax reform, with airports, lumps
of Telstra and other businesses. According to one analyst in 1999, state
assets sold for $30 billion were worth $75 billion. In other words, shares
were sold cheaply to boost their sale and popularity with financial heavies
and small investors alike (Feil 1999). Limitations of space prevent me
from detailing other state intervention.

This was state intervention that encouraged the service sector during
a boom time for globalisation, stimulated the wealth effect, and built
on the market and superannuation reforms of the Hawke and Keating. It
was also part of a government strategy in the late 1990s to leapfrog
the stricken Asia economies and position Sydney as a global financial
services city. This is one of those little things that Costello fails
to remember (see Hockey 1999; Costello 1999) because it didn’t
catapult Sydney into the top of the league. And now the elements holding
the various constituencies together, including those battlers, are sundered
by the financial and housing collapse. Obviously, many people were already
starting to feel the economic pinch last year and responded to Rudd’s
complaints about prices. Ominously for Rudd, government coffers won’t
have the same largesse for attracting alliances as they did under Howard.

In other words, we can see the circumstances in which Howard’s
language and credibility worked, and why a simple transfer of the crown
to Costello would not have been the only solution to Liberal problems.
The Howard strategy had come to the end of its political and economic
run, as did that of Bruce in 1929, and so much of Howard’s credibility
was built on it. Given Costello’s part in the Howard government,
he would have had to reinvent his credibility on the scale of Keating’s
achievement in 1991–92. Judging by this book, it is unlikely that
Costello could have done it. A Coalition train wreck was gathering pace
in 2005 and was probably inevitable by 2007. Costello’s credibility
and reputation would not have been enough to counter the well-executed
Labor campaign described by van Onselen and Senior, and constructed on
a combination of influential events and shifting public opinion.

REFERENCES

Anderson, P. & Wild R. 2007, Little Children Are Sacred—Report
of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal
Children from Sexual Abuse, Northern Territory Government [Online]
Available: http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/ [2008,
Nov 16].

Williams, P. 1997, The Victory: The Inside Story of the Takeover
of Australia, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards Sydney.

Mark Rolfe is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences & International
Studies at the University of New South Wales, dealing with rhetoric,
satire and propaganda, Australian prime ministers, and Americanisation.
No prime ministers were harmed in the making of this article.